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It’s been a season of win-lose here in Gritropolis. This, so pointedly captured by this weekend—on the court, on stage & sigh, at the movies.

Having a Pyrrhic victory may be fine for some. Not for me. Sure, that fat head no talent Tyler Perry, finally let a woman wear the dress. But his dreck came in number one at the box office. The one solace I have is that all people buying tickets for that movie have been tagged by Homeland Security, as no threat whatsoever to US intelligence.

While Serena Williams blew up at the US Open ( tennis ) for what she felt was an umpire’s wrong call on a foot fault*, Kanye West retained his title as Biggest Loudmouth in Music. Homeboy still believe he can hit that Beyonce groove thang, soon as the girl see he prettier than Jay Z. Or delusional that Taylor Swift has jungle fever & digs stupid guys. Either way, he on crack. One thing I know for certain—Taylor Swift’s videos are better than Tyler Perry’s. Watching hers only get you tagged by the local Fish & Game Commission. And that’s so they can call you for a donation.

If Serena can be fined an amount the equivalent of her tennis shoe allowance for a Grand Slam tournament (just kidding-I know she gets them gratis), why can’t that ahole Kanye get fined by the FCC. Why? for being an ahole in prime time. I bet Mr. Obama’s backhanded smack of Kanye got more play than anything he might’ve said publicly about Joe Wilson (R-Rep. South Carolina). He probably just got an atta boy from Rush Limbaugh—ha ha ha ad infinitum. Times like these I wish James Brown was still alive to advise some entertainers. Not the sports James Brown. Or the other sports James Brown. Or one of the Steve Smiths. The late great King of Soul. Of course!

There’s more, but I like to stick to the headlines. I do feel compelled to inject a future story—Prince Fielder, the really talented & large (+ packing a few more lbs. than needed ) first baseman of your Milwaukee Brewers, is likely to be trade bait over the Winter. Team very interested resides in Boston. Since they are allowed to make any move & be praised for it by buttboys at ESPN, I can’t fight the power. It is true, they have gone too long without a big fat guy to play first for them, since Mo Vaughn left. And Pig Papi Ortiz admitted his ” protein drinks ” only enable him to do one thing well—hit v. the Yankees.

Speaking of baseball, who won the World Series? The season must have ended while I was on my retreat in Nepal, searching for the home of Deechen Lachman.** I had no joy finding it, though I did run into the Dalai Lama.† When I asked him if he knew her, he said vexedly—” she’s Australian, you moron.” If I’d have known the MLB season wound up early so ESPN could go football 24/7, I’d have asked the Dalai Lama about the WS. Hey! he was all ready pissed off, I had nothing to lose there.

All I can get from ESPN is football f*gs, enabling gamblers with point spreads & injury reports & sucking up to coach. They are stat diligent to the point of being anal. I’m amazed they don’t do the Pop Warner games. Must be a licensing fee conflict. Or maybe the authorities draw an age line for boys locker rooms those bozo can invade. Why don’t I just Google? have I mentioned the page-load times for me & this old dial up here on the Copper Line yet this post? Oh look! there’s some mail from the Dept. of Homeland Security. . ..

” We love our god and our guns. . ..” this a direct quote from a political ad, approved by John McCain, running on a local radio station here in the New River Valley of Virginia. A political statement meant to exhort Virginians to vote against Barack Obama, because he apparently doesn’t love their god or their guns. Love means cleaning, oiling & fondling your grandaddy’s 30 aught 6.

They love guns here all right. They love to sell them too. That’s how a mental patient, who slipped through a loophole in the VA TECH student psych screening process, bought two guns here in Virginia. Then took them to school for Show & Kill. Who is their god? Glock? or the twin deities, Smith & Wesson?

Not too far from here, about 10 miles as the Jim Crow flies, there still stands the site of slave cabins. No doubt my own house is built above the unmarked graves of somebody who caught a free cruise to the land of the free. This area rarely has a sunny start to a day.* Often, it’s more a mist, I call it gray-light. Maybe it’s the angry gun god, all smoke and bitter ash for dirty deeds. Or possibly the arsenal also, just down the road apiece. . ..

I have said previously, the President of the United States is a spokes model. He/she(?) walks point for the daily patrol-an important job, yes. But the chief exec leads the team out front. There are those no longer so deep in the shadows, who run things. Those guys have no gods. This, because they think they are them. What they do best is send out people to do things for them, destabilize a Third World country or prop up a druglord in a slag heap ending with -stan. Then they trot the Pres out to meet the press for an atta boy and a tutorial in spin doctoring.

Doing that needs lots of guns and money. No doubt Mr. Obama would prefer to use what’s left of the American economy to keep us strong at home. Roofs over our heads and a chicken in every pot and/or microwave. But that kind of thing upsets the ‘ foreign policy ‘ of the power brokers who work behind the curtains of the Oval Office.

Hollywood has remade a classic flick, The Day the Earth Stood Still. The premise of which is, extraterrestrial is sent to Earth to terminate it. Mainly due to our warlike ways. Naturally this is greeted with loads of firepower, which makes the alien think it’s actually on Mars, named after the god of war. Right after the shameful name of the NFL franchise in our nation’s capitol is changed, I’m petitioning the new administration to switch from Earth to Mars. Or at least the Dirty 3rth. Hey, yo I’m street, dogg!

When a political party’s endgame endorsement has god & guns as the slam dunk argument for its candidate, you know it’s in trouble. If McCain really heard that ad and approved it, it’s troublesome. If a lackey rubber stamped it for him, it’s even more so. I knew we were backwards here, but this is straight out of the Johnny Reb Handbook. The South will rise again? well not before my dinner does.

So, while I continue to live in Bubbadoon,* where it’s always 1808 with football & cell phones—their god approves of some new fangled things! I get out my pork rinds & moonshine, ready to watch the election returns. Who will win—Hatfield or McCoy? er, um I mean Obama or McCain. Actually, I thought Obama was an Irish name- what? you never heard of the Black Irish!

What a week for the self righteous. And for the type who think showing up late to a party, makes you sophisticated. Not to mention me, a person with more than one dimension, all of which are worn out by the same old shit. Michael Vick gets sentenced. Then MLB does a mea culpa for use of performance enhancing drugs ( PED ) and famous pretentious windbag Oprah Winfrey, throwing her considerable weight ( it yoyos ) behind Barack Obama.

First, Vick. Jock thug gets busted for an illegal ‘ sport.’ Apparently making millions of dollars doing his questionably legal sport, football didn’t meet his needs. Sadly, he has supporters, who say things such as—it’s only dogs-or-dogfights are part of the culture he was raised in-or-he’s a moron, what do you expect! OK, I said the last one. To date, my suggestion to take all his earnings & use them to help animals, seems to be ignored. The Atlanta Falcons, his former team, is more concerned with recovering the monies they’ve paid him. This isn’t just because they’re justifiably disappointed, but so they can remove this huge amount from their payroll and open up room in the salary cap, the proscribed $ limit they can spend for player salaries per season.

Another aspect of the Vick conviction, is what happens after he successfully serves his time, 23 months. Theoretically, since many spend jail time in the gym, Vick will still be young and fit enough to make a football comeback. I can say what I want about his lack of intellect, the guy has mad athletic skills. My opinion is: if he can play again in the NFL, I say let him. Take half of his pay and use it to help animals. Yes, I am dogged with my suggestions, like hmmm a pitbull! Oh yeah, and create a restraining order involving him & dogs. . ..

Bud Selig, former used car salesman and owner of the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team & current commissioner of baseball, finally noticed some players had fatheads. This wasn’t just from a disproportionate sense of self worth. Nope, it was from anabolic steroid abusage, which rhymes with dope. Selig hired former Senator George Mitchell, once on the board of directors for the Boston Red Sox, to head an investigation into the use of PED in professional baseball. Gee, maybe they should start by ridding their sport of conflicts of interest first. Our sitting President, G.W. Bush, was once the owner of a MLB team. He & Congress would like nothing better than to really get in on this ( they did previously in 2005 ). Can you say: Major League Distraction?

The report came out yesterday December 13 and several names of alleged users are provocative. This fuels the jock talk in the media. For me, it’s excellent. It bumps time from the sick radio & TV network obsession with football. It won’t last, but it’s something.The lords of baseball are like dads who finally figure out the reason their kid is burning incense isn’t because the kid has embraced Buddhism. Now daddy is pissed—no kid of mine is gonna be a hophead— kind of thing. Sigh. Yes, some of these drugs are now illegal. Yes, they could cause future health risks to the user: at least one athlete has died from steroid use, Lyle Alzado, a football player. That this fact is a throw away AND that it occurred well over 10 years ago, shows the continued cupidity, if not culpability of sports suits and their ancillaries, sports writers, reporters, fans etc. Did I mention football?

It remains to be seen what these buttoned down boardroom blowhards will do to rid the baseball world of dopers. A world they encourage & enable by demanding performance, which due to expansion has diluted & spread thin the premiere performers & allowed many to linger on at older ages and/or make major league rosters, who once would’ve been career minor leaguers. Some of the use was to speed up the healing from injury, to simply return to performing, as opposed to unfairly enhancing it. But illegal is illegal. Now. Hey, daddy needs to bring home the bacon. But this and the Vick situation raises the dilemma of authority favoring curative versus preventative solutions. See how well the war on the rest of the drugs has gone! Not. I bet the sales numbers on Kentucky whiskey & cigars goes way up. Though not Cuban cigars. Those are still illegal. Unless you have a source.

Root cause(s) need to be addressed. Oh, I don’t advocate letting off a rapist, child molester, mass murderer because they had early childhood trauma. It’s not easy or effective yet, accurately predicting who will grow up to be a Manson or a Mother Theresa. Or even if we could, what to do about it. I sure hope that’s where the real effort must be. Better prisons or smarter lawyers ain’t gonna do it. So, good luck.

Now as for Oprah’s endorsement of Mr. Obama. I bet she wrestled long and hard. Hillary or Barack? Over and over. I’d say maybe two commercial breaks worth. Obvious which way she’d go. Hey! he’s from her home state of Illinois. I so wanted to use a black & white( meaning obvious ) decision. My third choice was slam dunk, but everybody knows white women can’t jump.

I would like to take this opportunity to endorse Mr. Obama too. This does not bode well for him, based on my political track record. As much as I’d like to see a woman in the Ovule, errrr Oval Office*, Mrs. Clinton has way too much baggage on so many levels, including the problem of what to call the first Presidential male partner**, who just also happens to be a former President! The First Man? too anthropological. First Husband? technically accurate on 2 counts. First ex-Pres and guy in US history in this situation? shorten it to Expotus, sounds Greek, a foreshadowing of the theatrics sure to follow. I like that one best. BTW there is no prize for observing how many capital O’s were necessary to create these two paragraphs.

Imus will reportedly return to radio Dec. 3, on WABC-AM NYC. OK. Good. Can’t wait to hear what happens. He & Capitol Hillary will be going at it as soon as that studio light goes on air.

Now: the number one movie at the box office is: WHY DID I GET MARRIED. The number one question is WHY IS IT NUMBER 1? I demand everyone who paid to see it be fired. It’s based on a stage-play by Tyler Perry and features a virtually all black cast. The first fact is always troublesome. The latter is a head scratcher. . .. If a non-African American made that hiring ‘ choice, ‘ they’d be Imus-cized by Sharpton & Jesse. I think that is racism. I also think 99% of stage-plays don’t translate to big screen well. Too er, um stagey.

I’m not foolish enough to suggest producers can’t chose who they work with on a project. I support it as the best possible way to do anything. For example; Ms. Clinton won’t be employing Don Imus to do her PR in 2008. It’s a comfort level thing ya’ll. She should work something out with Mr. Obama though.

The separate but equal syndrome of American Society is pure bullshit. I was once competing for a radio job against 60 people. It was finally down to three candidates. The woman had emergency surgery, the other guy was too fruity, so I got the gig. If any African-American had jogged by that day, they’d have been hired. Mainly because the Nazi loving, Midwest moron who was General Manager hated me. I won’t say why. Though, my possession of an independent mind, didn’t help.

All us Rainbow chillunz can have our ars gratia artis in the USA. Especially if it comes up $$$. There is an overnight sports talk host on the same station Imus once worked BNH ( Before Nappy-headed Hos ). He’s black & for his bumper music he almost always uses music by blacks. It’s the stuff he likes to hear. It’s great material too. Yet, imagine if Imus had only played ‘ white ‘ musicians—which he absolutely did not. Or anybody.

A really good actor, Terrence Howard, who broke through with the movie Hustle & Flow, which was just as much about making it in the music business as pimping hos. When the song It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp, won the Oscar, he was asked if he planned to make a rap record. Howard smiled and essentially said he was an actor and his personal taste was more James Taylor. Not only is he a good actor, he’s brave! For the record: I liked both the song AND the movie. Nothing is ever true to life, if you’re the one living it. But that flick gave the uninitiated a taste. BTW I was never in the life, but I ain’t uninitiated.

Imus be back, soon. Bad Black flick number one. That’s living in America, if I may quote the late James Brown, King of Soul & well known nutcase. This coming week Why Did I Get Married will compete for the top spot with a new Halle Berry melodrama & a vampires in Alaska movie: 30 Days of Night. Hey, WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT!!!